[Sussex] Gentoo forked...

[Geoff Teale]

Well Paul,

You see the trouble with slashdot is that anybody can get anything up 
there... you shouldn't take Zachary's words as gospel.

Having seen this thing played out on the gentoo developer list my 
(somewhat) unbiased opinion is this:

One pissed off developer has left Gentoo and wants to start a new 
project based on Gentoo code.  His web site contains a tirade that is 
deeply one-sided, massively exaggerated and contains blatant lies.  As 
such, no announcement has been made on the Gentoo official site, and on 
the gentoo developers list Daniel Robbins (the founder and leader of 
Gentoo) has wished Zachary good luck, pointed out that he is not being 
100% honest in his public announcement and committed to not making any 
kind public aknowledgement of this (Daniel doesn't want this to become a 
slagging match).

Core to this dispute is Zachary T Welch's desire to build a profitable 
business around Gentoo and the conflict his requirements had with the 
plans Daniel Robbins (and the majority of the Gentoo community had).

Zachary is seeing fit to blame another project "Gentoo Games Inc" for 
the general non-acceptance of his idea to turn Gentoo into a specialist 
embedded development platform.  Zynot -  his new project will be a 
not-for-profit development in this field which he hopes to use as the 
centre of a support and consultancy business. 

Zachary (in his anger) has also claimed that Daniel Robbins wants Gentoo 
to be a profitable company - this is not true, Daniel would like to make 
a living using Gentoo technology, but Gentoo itself is a project founded 
on the same principles as Debian (we even have an almost identical 
social contract). Zachary's knowingly incorrect argument leverages on 
the fact that a separate project "Gentoo Games" shares technology and a 
name with Gentoo.  Gentoo is in the process of being incorporated as a 
not-for-profit organisation - this is distinct from Gentoo Games.  
Whilst Gentoo Games do and will leverage Gentoo technology to achieve 
their aims they are no different in this respect to Zachary's new 
organisation.  Gentoo Games CD's feature distinct technology from a 
standard Gentoo distribution that was developed privately by Gentoo 
Games outside of the Gentoo project and without the use of donated 
funds.  Large parts of this technology have been donated back to the 
Gentoo project and make up a large part of the Gentoo Live CD technology. 

In essence it comes down to this.  Daniel and Zachary both have 
different objectives, both are very strongly willed people and 
eventually Zachary's business plan has led him to split of to support 
his idea.  His outburst is probably 50% frustration and 50% cunning 
marketing.  Either way the point is, this is less a Gentoo fork - the 
two projects have different objectives and will develop in different 
areas - and more the birth of a new distro - Zynot is to Gentoo as 
Embedix is to Red Hat.

The joy of two open projects is that each will be able to feed of the other.

-- 
GJT
gteale at cmedltd.com


Paul Turner wrote:

>The Gentoo project has been forked..
>
>see: http://slashdot.org/articles/03/06/26/048221.shtml?tid=106&tid=185
>
>
>P.
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